8 From Greenpeace Surrounded in Amazon
Wednesday, October 17, 2007 12:39 PM EDT
The Associated Press
By MICHAEL ASTOR Associated Press Writer

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) — Hundreds of loggers and angry residents have surrounded eight Greenpeace members who tried to leave an Amazon town with a scorched tree trunk for an exhibit on global warming, the environmental group said Wednesday.

The activists are holed up in the makeshift headquarters of the federal environmental agency in the town of Castelo dos Sonhos, Greenpeace campaigner Andre Muggiati said. "They are still surrounded and the situation is tense," he said by telephone.

The region in the Amazon state of Para is part of the so-called "arc of destruction," the southern edge of the rain forest that has been devastated by loggers. In 2005, American missionary Dorothy Stang was shot dead in the region during a land dispute.

On Tuesday, the Greenpeace activists tried to haul away a badly burned fallen tree trunk for an exhibit on global warming in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Muggiati said.

He said the federal environmental agency Ibama gave Greenpeace the OK to transport the tree trunk, but the permission was suspended in the wake of the standoff.

The newspaper Jornal Provincia do Tapajos said residents were angry Greenpeace removed the trunk without getting the local community's permission.

"How can Ibama allow Greenpeace to do this type of extraction when they're not even capable of approving our management plans?" community leader Vilson Ketterman told the newspaper. He was referring to plans loggers must file to show their operations meet basic environmental standards.

Management plans and permissions to transport tree trunks are the main tools the Brazilian government uses to control illegal logging in the Amazon.

The region around Castelo dos Sonhos has a long history of tension between the federal government, loggers and environmentalists. Greenpeace is especially unwelcome in the region, where the group has denounced illegal logging done to make way for soybean fields.